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Friday Squid Blogging: Researching Squid Bacteria

Intriguingly, that gene is the one that enables the bacteria to form a biofilm, the tightly woven matrix of "slime" which allows bacterial colonies to behave in many ways like a single organism. "The biofilm might be critical for adhering to the light organ, or telling the host that the correct symbiont has arrived," says Mandel.

Biofilms also seem to be important in another kind of bacterial invasion of animals: disease. Some normally harmless lung bacteria can turn into a nasty infection in humans by forming a biofilm, for example, while many immune defences are aimed at preventing biofilms. And certain bacteria, like Vibrio fischeri, typically invade only certain species and tissues.

The slides posted at NIST were useful. I'm encouraged that NIST will allow submitters to tweak security parameters for round 2 -- and NIST generally seems to have thought more deeply about security/performance tradeoffs since the AES process.

Yay that Daniel Bernstein highlighted a faster variant of CubeHash at the end of his slides. CubeHash is elegant enough that I didn't want to see it go down easily just because of his hyperconservative choices. :)

This may just be my shallow exposure to crypto papers showing -- it also seems like there's more rigor than in the past about evaluating whether attacks really cost less than brute force (using time*memory or whatever metric).

Love that I just launched into a diatribe about the SHA-3 candidate conference (or the materials I could read) without any lead-in. Here's the missing introduction: Hey everybody, here's my diatribe about the SHA-3 candidate conference!